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Dusk used to be my favourite time of day. I sought relentlessly for a scent or a feeling that would remind me of the vivid memories attributed to it, each one something I wished I could re-experience, something I wished I could just live in forever and feel content and victorious. There was just something so special, so unique, and so uncanny about how the light from the fading sun was at its most beautiful when it was dying. It was leaving Earth for another day, and it was giving out the last of its rays to try and cheer us up, as if to say, "It's okay, I'll be back soon." That is what made me love it more than the night and the moon. A late spring evening just a few years ago, I was lying on the bed, reading, when I had to put my book down on my bed's throw, and I had to take the arm off the vinyl, and I had to open the blinds fully, just to look outside at the warm, orange sky truly aglow emanating heat like a fireplace. It was serene, yet it made me feel terrible. It made me feel empty. It zoned me out, right into space. It spoke to me--it said "Fritz, you are the arbiter of your destiny" --and that was when I realised, I had to do something. Anything. I paced up and down my room relentlessly. Carpe diem. And all I did was cry. How? How could something so stunning make me feel so horrible? How could all this beauty make me want to die?

I don't like dusk anymore. But there I was, stuck in the apocalypse that was a permanent midsummer's late night. A permanent emptiness. A wasteland of soul-crushing serenity and uncontented longing that would never resolve. A place that sucked the life out of lifeless. A place that left the dead begging for death.

I stood just outside the bunker. Beneath my paws, the dirt was moist and dry simultaneously, like sand and butter. If I took a step, it left a pawprint, but it soon hardened. There were the remnants of where the other survivor's cars had sped away into the wasteland, looking for an escape. One of those cars contained my father. I frowned, plunging deeply into guilt again. I sighed a sombre breath and continued to scan the horizon. Every tree was an ochre yellow, like a wilting collection of tangerines squishing into marmalade. It was an autumn skyline, but the sun shone harshly in its summer blaze. Artificial autumn. There were no remaining greens anywhere. It was like the colour had ceased to exist.

The sky was a murky grey fading into a leather-like brown where the debris and ash and soot lingered there, floating menacingly. The sun bored into my eyes, forming a bokeh as the light glared against my fur. It was hot. Hot and dry, hot and cold, hot as though this was hell. A gentle breeze ruffled along my back, but it was unfriendly. Uninviting. Desolate.

There was no joy to be found. As I walked past a park, no children were swinging merrily. The swing just rocked sadly by itself as the rust peeled off its chains. It too would soon face its inevitable death. Nothing could survive out here. I continued walking through the dead fields as I searched for any sign of life. Anything--another fur, an insect, or even a poppy. Just any hint, any singular mark that I was not alone.

Well, I walked and walked and ran. I screamed and punched trees and cut myself hopping over barbed wire and stung myself on deceased nettles savagely stinging me with their last breaths. I trod through forests, following little rivers upstream, until the sprawling fields returned once more, and the sun burnt my fur as I just ventured deeper into the abyss. I had never expected this.

I got to a little clearing in a rather large wood, where I could just make out the bordering fence in shambles a few metres away, another endless field beckoning me onward. I was ready to leap over it and continue my journey to nowhere, but my legs refused to move. They just stopped, trembling feebly beneath me. I was not tired, nor weak, but they just... faltered. It was at this point I could no longer bear to distract myself with walking. Thirst screamed in my throat, my head throbbing with immense surges of pain and insanity, hunger loomed in my chest as my stomach flipped on itself, and desperation tinged my whiskers as they flicked uselessly in the despotic air. I fell to my knees and cradled them as I rocked myself.

I began to cry. What else was there to do? Long breaths of sobbing and pain were futile--the feeling of breathlessness that I couldn't quench flooded my lungs and made me wail out louder. Louder, louder, screaming as loud as I could as all my emotions brewed a poison within me. Anger made me furious, and all I wanted to do was stab and kill and murder. Sadness made me feel sick, and all I wanted to do was bury myself deep in the fallout and die. Loneliness made me insane, and I begged for my father to come back. I begged for my mother to come back. I begged, I yelled, I prayed until I couldn't anymore, and then I was a silent waste of fur lying on the dirty mud.

I remembered when the worst thing in life I had ever faced was a cold. Surely if this was the torment that I was going through, then nothing could ever crush me again. A soul that is missing cannot be shattered or hurt. A soul that has moved on can never be sold. But there was still a problem: I still had a heart. A young one, one that could be shattered and hurt and stamped on.

It yearned for the wolf. It yearned for the sweet touch of another person. It yearned for my father, it yearned for my childhood to return. Perhaps as I laid there on the ground years passed. I chose to ignore time; it was worthless at the end of it. I could not move, I could hardly think, and I held my breath for as long as I could just to feel something that didn't play with my emotions.

"Well, shit, trust the billionaire's perfect boy to have apocalypse-proofing. He's hardly got a scar on him!" said a rough voice suddenly. I felt a stick prodding into my side, and I squeezed my eyes tightly trying to be as still as possible.

"Attica, that's because he's not dead. Look at him, he's breathing! Thank goodness!" said another, higher-pitched tone.

"Thank goodness? You realise this is Fritz Furfaro right, not some random fox for you to fangirl over like the rest of them?" replied that voice with a pitchy fry to it, who I assumed was Attica.

"Shut up! Just because of that one time, you've gone on about it ever since! Come on, we can't just leave him here."

"Yeah, no, I am not lugging around this spoiled brat with us. Just get his stuff and leave him for the waste, Grey, stop being such a pansy," said Attica. A chill ran up and down my spine as she commanded the other voice, Grey, to crouch down next to me, and as his breathing got closer it was raspy and shuddery in my ears. I felt my pockets being pulled inside out, and then I was rolled over so he could sling my bag off my back. I tried to keep still, to make it look like I was asleep or comatose, not wanting to confront anyone in the crisis I was raging through.

"Oops... sorry, yikes! Sorry..." stammered Grey as he slowly pulled it from my shoulders. A tag from the bag whacked my eye as he took it off and I sat up with a jerk, clutching it in pain. So much for sleeping.

The unexpected brightness made my vision fuzzy as it tried to adjust, and I had those little stars dotting all over the place, like a blizzard of light. I could hear Grey as he stammered back and yelped out an amusing little whimper as he stared at me. Eventually, my sight settled, and I looked at him, and it was evident he was aptly named; he was a short tiger, with beautiful grey fur that glistened in the light, the little beams shining through it looking like rays from a cloud. Despite his fear, he wore a small little smile that made one of his fangs pop through. I looked over to Attica, and she was a stellar contrast: a taller, muscular cougar. She had a hockey stick in her free paw and she looked on at me with a scowl.

"Fancied a nap, did we?" she said, "I had no idea fallout was so comfortable. It must be radiating."

"Attica! Don't be mean, he's exhausted!" snarked Grey as he hopped over to stand next to me. He lent out his paw to me and gave a soft chuckle. "She's been a real ass after that nuke went off. I mean, she was an ass before. But now she's like, a dragon's ass."

I looked up at the pair of them. The wind whistled as it blew all sorts of debris through the air: leaves, ash, dirt, stray wires and chunks of plastic. I looked up and began to laugh. I laughed as hard as I had cried, I laughed hard enough to bring me back to tears again. This time, it wasn't as freeing. It wasn't as rejuvenating and it didn't make me feel better. It just made me feel worse as the true weight of reality hit me. I could cry for the future, but I was crying for the past, and whilst the future is within a paw's reach away, the past is unobtainable.

As I cried, Grey sat down next to me and put a soft pink paw on my knee reassuringly. He smiled softly, and his own eyes began to water. "It sucks, doesn't it?" he said with a painful exhale that was supposed to be a laugh.

"Understatement of the century there," said Attica. She made her way over and sat next to Grey. She put down her hockey stick and slumped over with a frown on her own face. "It's torture for the life we never got to ruin."

"I lost someone. I don't know if he's alive or not" I blubbered out.

"We lost our parents. Mama got hit by the blast, she worked in the city. Papa got radiation sickness a few days later," said Attica.

"Your parents? You're siblings?"

"Yeah, well Grey is adopted. No one else wanted him so he got stuck with us," she teased.

"Hey! Mummy said she liked my fur," he remarked back. He looked at her with a furrowed brow but he couldn't hide the smirk creeping up on the side of his muzzle.

We sat on the ground for a while longer, talking and ranting about everything. It felt good to open up, despite how hard it was at first. The conversation never died--Attica's teasing made sure of it. I felt the utmost respect for her; how could she be so detached from it all? I couldn't comprehend how anyone could do anything but flail uselessly at it all. Grey was similar, but his optimism was evidently a façade. Each joke about his parents made his eyes well, and he had this distinctive tail flick every time he felt angry. The sun was setting by the time we finally got up and started heading out of the woods.

"Where were you off to, anyway? No cryogenic storage or supercool radioactive fighting monsters in your mansion?" asked Grey as he plodded along in front of me and Attica.

"Heh, sadly not," I said with a tearful smile, "my dad left for Europe."

"Why wouldn't you go with him? Don't tell me you're as daft as you look," snarled Attica.

"I have... something... to do first."

"Well, we're headed to the city. Apparently, there are shuttles every sundown heading upstate. We're gonna get out of here," she said.

My ears pricked up as a thought entered my head. If the wolf had survived, then he would have definitely headed to the city and taken the train. He would be upstate somewhere, waiting for me patiently. He would be sitting there, a sign in his paws with my name on it, patiently expecting me. Yes, that was it.

"Then I'm coming too," I said.